When it comes to spiritual matters, I’m what you might call a devout agnostic. I have no use for religion in my own life, but I don’t question the meaning and comfort it provides to a lot of other folks. I don’t know if there’s a god. I can easily imagine the universe coming into being all on its own. But that doesn’t mean that it did, which is a question I personally find unanswerable. And as for the question of whether human beings have an immortal soul and/or something to look forward to at the conclusion of this life, again, I’ve got nothing. Seems to me that it’s entirely plausible the thing we call “consciousness” is merely a function of the biochemical processes in our brains, and once those processes cease once and for all, everything that we are flickers away like a program derezzing in the movie Tron. But then it’s equally plausible to me that there is something more, since science assures us that matter and energy are interchangeable, nothing is ever really destroyed, and there are dimensions of existence we cannot perceive. I have a healthy enough ego that I certainly hope there’s an afterlife. As to what form it may take, who knows? I like to imagine we’ll be reunited with people who mattered to us, and maybe have a chance to put right the things we screwed up. I once suggested to a grieving friend that perhaps the best kind of afterlife would be nothing more than a re-creation of the time and place where we were most happy, a kind of substantiated, infinitely looping memory. But again, who knows? My personal philosophy about these things is probably best summed up by something Mr. Spock once said, “There are always possibilities.”

You may be wondering what’s got me ruminating about such grand and potentially morbid topics on this, my 41st birthday. Don’t worry, I’m not depressed, and I’m not having another meltdown like I did last year when I hit the Big Four-Oh. I’m actually pretty sanguine about the birthday this year. No, I just started thinking about this stuff because of something James Lileks wrote yesterday on his Daily Bleat. His daughter’s hamster died, which led to this nice little thought-provoking paragraph:

An hour after the burial a squirrel came up to me as I sat in the gazebo – brazen, fearless – and he looked at me, chattered, and scurried away. Made me think of all the storybook animals kids grow up with, the eternal happy now where a squirrel is every squirrel, a rabbit is every rabbit. You never forget that, really. You’d like to think that when you’re old and halt and shuffling through the leaves at the edge of the 100-Acre Wood, the bear and the pig and the donkey and the tiger will appear, waving hallo, welcoming you back.
Who knows. Maybe they will.

I like that, both as a piece of writing and as an idea. Of course, in my case it’s more likely to be Steve Austin and Chewbacca welcoming me back, but hey, the same logic applies. And the same heartwarming emotions.

By an interesting coincidence, I’ve just finished watching the television series Dead Like Me on DVD. It ran for two seasons on Showtime back in the early 2000s (man, that sounds weird!), and while I didn’t find it to be entirely satisfying — the show’s quirky, black sense of humor doesn’t entirely jibe with my own sensibilities, and it really seemed to lose steam in the second season — it was filled with interesting ideas and more than a few effective moments. The series begins with an 18-year-old college dropout named Georgia Lass getting hit and killed by a toilet seat that fell from the defunct Mir space station, only instead of moving on to whatever eternal reward awaits the rest of us, she finds herself working as a Grim Reaper, harvesting the souls of the recently deceased (or more technically the about-to-be deceased, since she actually “reaps” their souls just before their deaths) and trying to figure out the mysteries of life even though she’s no longer technically living.

As I said, the show contained a lot of interesting ideas, one of which (the one that is really central to the series and most germane to what I’ve already said today) is that the reapers have no more idea of what comes in the next world than anybody else. Their role is simply to be there with the deceased so they’re not alone when they make the transition. That’s the same general idea as encountering the bear, the pig, the donkey, and the tiger again, isn’t it? To have trusted friends there to help us move into… whatever else there is.

As I said earlier, I hope there’s something like that, some aspect of ourselves that lives on, a place for it to exist, a facilitator of some sort to welcome us there. It’s not rational. There’s no evidence for it. But as with the existence of God Himself (or Herself), I can’t bring myself to say categorically that these things aren’t there. Is that my ego talking, the part of me that doesn’t want to cease to exist? Maybe. But maybe not…